Two of the approvals help the expansion of the Abbot Point coal export facilities in north Queensland, near Bowen and the Whitsunday Islands. This is mainly to dig coal from massive planned mines in the Galilee Basin for export and burning.

As I’ve outlined before, the coal planned to be dug up from two other Galilee mines would emit about 3.7 billion tonnes of CO2 – that’s about six years worth of the emissions of Australia or the UK.

With a long list of conditions which it is claimed will protect the reef and local habitat, Hunt has approved the dredging of up to three million cubic metres of material from the ocean bottom for the new coal terminal. The dredged material will be dumped in the ocean, putting more pressure on the Great Barrier Reef which already has an uncertain future.

The other two approvals are part of Queensland’s rapid multi-billion dollar expansion of the contentious coal seam gas industry.

Given the go ahead are a nine-kilometre pipeline to get the gas from Gladstone to Curtis Island and a new plant there to compress the gas and export up to 18 million tonnes a year of liquified natural gas. Both projects are owned by Arrow Energy (jointly owned by Shell and PetroChina).

Eleven million Melbourne Cricket Grounds

But these decisions are just part of an awesome effort in the last 250 years or so to dig up and burn fossil fuels that have powered our modern lives.

What has this effort achieved in a historical context, in terms of smacking our climate around the chops?

Between 1750 and 2012, according to the Global Carbon Project, our fossil fuel burning has emitted about 1,407 billion tonnes (gigatonnes) of carbon dioxide.

This year, the Global Carbon Project says we will likely reach an all time high of emitting about 36 billion tonnes of CO2 from fossil fuel burning and cement making.

That’s a difficult number to visualise.

To give us an idea of just how much CO2 that actually is, geologist Derek Taylor has calculated that one gigatonne of CO2 is enough to fill the Melbourne Cricket Ground 300,000 times.

That means emissions this year from fossil fuel burning would create enough carbon dioxide to fill about 11 million MCGs or 16 million Wembley stadiums.

History making

Efforts like the coal and gas extraction in Australia are helping to push the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to almost 400 parts per million.

Levels like this have not been seen on earth since the Pliocene era, which ended about 2.6 million years ago.